Children at Crystal River Elementary School have been reading “Peter Pan,” the story first published as a play 122 years ago. They like the book (an abridged version), know all about Peter’s lost shadow, Tinkerbell, flying and the dog, Nana. Across town, and up the age spectrum, a team of veterans is acting in “For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday.”
Missy Moore, artistic director of the Thunder River Theatre Company (TRTC), chose the play, the fourth the group has done by Sarah Ruhl. It features five siblings, aged late 50s to 60s, who gather at the deathbed of their father, 84. The production’s actors are also those ages.
“It highlights many of the actors who have made TRTC,” Moore told a small “Sips and Scripts” audience of aficionados at an initial read-through on March 30. “All of them have such deep, deep, deep roots in the creative history here.”
“For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday,” which starts and ends in a theater, deals with joy, age, loss and growing up — or not. A central element is the oldest child Ann’s warm memory of how her father brought her flowers when she played the title role in “Peter Pan,” about the boy who could fly and refused to grow up, in a children’s theater production in Davenport, Iowa. Her father was a family doctor, busy with illnesses and emergencies. “But,” she tells the audience, “he never missed me playing Peter Pan.”
The play is directed by Renee Prince, past founding executive artistic director of VOICES, an area nonprofit featuring original productions. Prince also directed “As Close As I Can” for the Denver Fringe Festival and TRTC, “Endgame” at TRTC and “Lyonesse” for Aspen Fringe Festival. As an actor from Chicago, she originally came to Colorado for a summer as a cast member at the Creede Repertory Theatre, and ended up spending seven years there as its education director.
Interviewed before the read-through, Prince said: “This play asks really big, good questions about how we live in the face of death, in the face of mortality and the deaths of our cherished loved ones. How do we wake up and go about our day with the end here? The Peter Pan myth is helping us explore some very serious questions about the human condition. I’m taking [childhood] play and playing pretend very seriously.”
She brought up various human ponderings: “Will I be remembered after I die? Will I see the people I love again? Will consciousness persist somehow?”
The play is very personally observed. Sarah Ruhl, who has written nearly 20 plays and four books, grew up in a home full of pictures of her mother “all over the house, flying,” as she wrote in American Theater, “in green tights.” Ruhl’s mother, Kathleen, as a teen played Peter Pan with the Davenport Children’s Theater — a life-defining event. A young Ruhl was “mesmerized” by a photo of her mother with Mary Martin, a Broadway legend who played Peter in one of her most famous roles.
Kathleen went on to a career as an actor and director in Chicago theater. Sarah wrote the play for her mother as a gift on her, yes, 70th birthday.
The protagonist, Ann, like Kathleen, once played Peter Pan and, also like Kathleen, has suffered crushing losses; Kathleen lost her husband when he was just 52 and, soon after, both parents to cancer. Ann has three brothers and a sister, as does the author, Ruhl.
The stage role of Peter Pan has historically been played by women. One explanation is that adult women could fulfill the part amid child-labor restrictions, while still looking small enough to play a boy. Androgyny also softened the character of someone stealing children out of their bedroom at night, leaving their parents and Nana bereft. Maybe the more boyish and innocent Peter seemed the better.
The original play follows the adventures of Wendy, John and the kindergarten-age Michael Darling, whom Peter teaches to fly and leads to Neverland, where there are fairies and mermaids and no one ever has to grow up, but also murderous pirates and a stalking crocodile.
Ruhl’s play’s first two acts are realism, or as much as they can be with a ghost wandering around. The third act is surreal: The siblings go to Neverland, a sort of spirit world.
“For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday,” Ruhl writes in the preface notes, is styled upon Japanese Noh drama, with a three-part structure: “The protagonist meets the ghost, then recognizes the ghost, then dances with or embraces the ghost.”
The action takes place in a hospital room, at a wake and amid the fantasia of Neverland (the set will include a pirate ship, and one character doubles as Captain Hook). The siblings, denoted in the play by birth-order numbers, consider the moments they realized they had grown up, the appeal of never growing up and their own lives.
The three acts are called movements, as if in a symphony, and Ruhl writes in the prologue of the “musicality” of family speech. Dialogue in Movement Two is taken from interviews with her brothers and sister, and life patterns inform the characters’ habits of jumping in on each others’ sentences (with words or singing) and arguing politics (Clinton era). They tease, praise and irritate each other.
Prince called later years an intriguing time, for “the stories people have, that wealth of knowledge. I think we should spend way more time on this time of life. In our culture, there’s this cult of youth. Why? We’re missing so much when we make older people invisible. We’re robbing ourselves of so much of what it is to be a person.”
The assistant director of TRTC’s production is Travis Dean Wilson. The cast, all Roaring Fork Valley locals, is: Wendy Perkins, Chris Wheatley, Owen O’Farrell, Jeff Carlson, Kristin Carlson and Bob Moore.
“Peter Pan has been my favorite story since childhood,” Perkins, who plays Ann, said in a TRTC press release. She added, “I have never been this excited about a part and about the director, cast and the crew at TRTC.”
“For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday” runs at TRTC May 1 through 17. For tickets, visit thunderrivertheatre.com or call 970-963-8200